MITPressLog

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Kristen Haring, author of Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, comments on the recent naming of “you” as Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

In naming the amateur creators of Web content as its Person of the Year, Time magazine characterized their prominence in 2006 as “a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.” “Scale” is the crucial word here. The obvious, immediate backstory to the flourishing of user-generated content is simply the collaborative production of Web content that took place on a smaller scale throughout the past decade. The less-recognized, older backstory began a century ago.

Amateurs in the 1910s enthusiastically adopted the medium of two-way radio communication and, through their recreational tinkering with the technology, established new ways of thinking about radio. The activities of the first “hams” (hobbyists who transmit and receive radio signals) prepared the way for commercial radio broadcasting. And the ham community — which members sometimes called a “technical fraternity” — continued to influence American technology into the computer age. Their impact included technical changes at the circuit-board level as well as changing attitudes toward technology, which in turn affected decisions about technical investment, regulation, consumption, and implementation.

Ham radio is just one example from a larger category of technical hobbies. Hobbyists who, for instance, raced miniature airplanes, modified motorcycles, assembled model rockets, shot amateur movies, and built personal computers shared motivations and experiences with ham radio operators. Despite the differences in the apparatus and methods of their hobbies, all broadly enjoyed technicality — technical devices, technical interactivity, and status in separate technical communities — to the point of identifying with technology. They envisioned themselves as “tech” people.

Historically, there were many personal rewards from pursuing technical hobbies. Participants gained skills and a sense of accomplishment, found fellowship in a distinct group, claimed a place in the formidable technical world, reached new self-understandings, and improved career opportunities, all in an enjoyable recreational context. Hobbyists’ experiences with technology additionally had much broader effect. People who worked with technology in their spare time posed a vital counterpart to the prevailing technical culture. Hobbyists engaged with technology in a way that was fun, collaborative, educational, intense, and creative. These methods and values were independent from, and at times in direct conflict with, the technical culture of profit-driven production. Hobbyists caused non-hobbyists to question assumptions about technology.

MIT Press Teams up with London's Whitechapel Gallery

London’s famous Whitchapel Gallery and the MIT Press announce a new series, Documents of Contemporary Art.  Each volume will cover a single theme, practice, or obsession central to contemporary visual culture and will be a definitive anthology consisting of key writings on major issues in art today.  An internationally-known art historian, curator, critic, or artist will serve as guest editor for each volume, selecting writings that range from foundational texts to freshly made arguments.  The artists and writers included in this series represent diverse perspectives, generations, and voices in contemporary art.

The first two volumes in the series have just arrived—

Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, looks at the phenomenon of participation in art that has been both prevalent and contested since the 1990s.  Artists have increasingly sought to create situations and events that invite spectators to become active participants, in dialogue both their their context and with each other.  The book charts a historical lineage and theoretical framework for this tendency, presented throught the writings or artists, curators, and philosophers from the late 1950s to the present. 

And among art’s most significant developments worldwide since the 1960s has been a turn to the archive—the nextus of images, objects, documents, and traces through which we recall and revisit individual and shared memories and histories.  The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether, collects key writings by influential artists and theorists to explore ways in which the archive has become central in visual culture’s investigations of history, memory, testimony, and identity.

Also, be sure to watch for two new volumes this spring one on the rise of “design-art” and another that charts the shifting relationship between film and photography. 

Take a Hike for the Holidays

Looking for a last minute gift?  Or a fun and educational way to shed those holiday pounds?  In a recent article in the Boston Globe, Michael Kenney highlights a few Boston guidebooks that might just accomplish both.  One of the books he mentions is Nancy Seasholes latest, Walking Tours of Boston’s Made Land, twelve walks that trace where and why Boston's man-made land was created, and, along the way, Seasholes uncovers fascinating and little-known pieces of Boston history. The walks grew out of a course she teaches on the subject at the Harvard Extension School and they provide a new and different way of looking at this historic city. 

And for the armchair travelers on your list, Adam Sharr’s Heidegger’s Hut provides an intense look at the relationship between Martin Heidegger and his cabin in the Black Forest.  In her gift book round up in the New York Times, Penelope Green calls it:

A straight-faced look -- with photos, floor plans and even architectural models -- at the four-room mountain cottage that was the philosopher's Walden Pond. Photographs of Heidegger at the well, at his desk (with mysteriously empty shelves) and with a walking stick give this little book the feel of a family album. Was Die Hütte, as Heidegger called it, ''the site of a heroic confrontation between philosopher and existence''? A weekend getaway for a suburban romantic? Or an incubator of fascism?

Probably a little bit of each, implies Mr. Sharr, an architect and a professor at Cardiff University in Wales, who wrestles with Heidegger's role as a Nazi apologist (as well as his role as a suburban householder) but is mostly reverent in this examination of the phenomena (a hut, an outhouse, a well) that inspired the phenomenologist.

Also, remember that our holiday book sale—with lots of great last minute gift ideas—runs through December 31st.

Cool Stuff

Just a couple of buildings down from The MIT Press strange and amazing things are happening. Created in 1980 by Prof. Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab researchers and students explore the  intersection of computation and the arts which often results in some really cool stuff. A recent example are the headphones developed by Noah Vawter, a.k.a. Shifty. An article in the New York Times by Jascha Hoffman explains that instead of isolating the listener from the outside world, these headphones take whatever ambient noises happen to be around and create a musical composition. Wow! Check out Noah’s website and listen for yourself.

In Memory of Stephen M. Meyer

Stephen M. Meyer died on Sunday at the age of 54.   Meyer was a professor of political science at MIT, an expert in national security issues and a passionate advocate of global biodiversity.  As a tribute to him and his dedication to environmental politics and policy, we reprint an excerpt from his last book, The End of the Wild.

For the past several billion years evolution on Earth has been driven by small-scale incremental forces, such as sexual selection, punctuated by cosmic-scale disruptions—plate tectonics, planetary geochemistry, global climate shifts, and even extraterrestrial asteroids. Sometime in the last century that changed. Today the guiding hand of natural selection is unmistakably human, with potentially earth-shaking consequences.

The fossil record and contemporary field studies suggest that the average rate of extinction over the past hundred million years has hovered at several species per year. Today the extinction rate surpasses species per year and is accelerating rapidly; it may soon reach the tens of thousands. In contrast, new species are appearing at a rate of less than one per year.

Over the next years or so as many as half of the Earth’s species, representing a quarter of the planet’s genetic stock, will functionally if not completely disappear. The land and the oceans will continue to teem with life, but it will be a peculiarly homogenized assemblage of organisms unnaturally selected for their compatibility with one fundamental force: us. Nothing—not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, nor even “wildlands” fantasies—can change the current course. The broad path for biological evolution is now set for the next several million years. And in this sense the extinction crisis—the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today—is over, and we have lost.

You can read his obituary in the Boston Globe here and a statement from the MIT News office can be found here.   

Pushing the Limits of Vision

On December 10, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston unveiled its new home on Boston's waterfront. After seventy years at the leading edge of art in the city, they have opened a new, visionary building designed by award-winning architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro that is poised to capture the stimulation of contemporary culture and the excitement of a revitalized waterfront area.

Super Vision, the inaugural show, looks at both the thrill and the threat of vision without limits.  Superhuman vision, once the stuff of comic books, is no longer a fantasy, with new technologies transforming both what can be seen and how we are able to see. Super Vision examines how contemporary artists have responded to and interpreted this changing nature of vision, presenting work by 27 international artists in painting, sculpture, video, and photography.   Leading contemporary artists, including Bridget Riley, Jeff Koons, Mona Hatoum, Andreas Gursky, and Yoko Ono, explore both the estatic and the threatening aspects of contemporary visual experience. 

The show runs through April 29th.  More information on the show can be found here.  Take a little of the show home with the exhibition catalog, edited by Nicholas Baume, the Chief Curator of the ICA, Boston.   

Design Gifts for the Holidays

Stuck for a gift for that design and innovation lover on you list?  Here are a few suggestions:

Core 77 picked Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things as one of the 77 best design gifts under $77:

Bruce Sterling's latest is a wonderful book that explores technology, design, and the future in a post-industrial context. What would the world look like and act like if we had "an Internet of Things"? Pretty good, actually. But Sterling's prose is a pleasure in any world, and his neologisms are protosplendopulicious. Buy 4 of these books (they're cheap) and give 2 of 'em as gifts. (The fourth one is for yourself, since the first one you lent out didn't get returned.)

And, Bruce Nussbaum looked past the obvious and complied a list of books on BusinessWeek.com that will inform the thinking about innovation in the coming year and beyond.  One of them is Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge.   For more on Moggridge's project, be sure to read Helen Walter's article on the book which ran on BusinessWeek.com last week.  Here's a bit of what she has to say:

This is one hell of a book, and not just because at 766 pages, it requires a certain amount of strength to merely pick it up. Part history lesson, part computer science thesis, part design education, part personal design philosophy, it is fascinating, inspirational, occasionally baffling, and often hilarious.

It also provides intimate insight into a time and place already legendary in both design and business circles—the beginnings of the first tech boom in Silicon Valley that flourished in the 1970s. The author, designer Bill Moggridge, may not have been on hand to witness what was going on from the very beginning, having only moved with his family from his native England to Palo Alto, Calif., in 1979, but he soon became close with many of those designers, scientists, and engineers who would later be recognized (in some cases, not widely enough) as the true pioneers of the time.

Finally, the website Moggridge developed for the book is also very cool and worth a look. 

MIT Press Book Sale

The Winter 2006 MIT Press Book Sale

It's time for another MIT Press Book Sale! Help yourself to some great bargains on MIT Press books. We'll have thousands of books on sale at 70-90% off retail price. Limit 40 books per customer and 3 copies per title. Bring your friends.

DAY:      Thursday
DATE:    December 7th
TIME:     10:00am to 4:00pm
ROOM:   10-105, Bush Room
MAP:      Click Here

For event information call 617 253-5249, email books@mit.edu, or check here

Not in Cambridge?  You can take advantage of select MIT Press holiday titles for 50% off.  Here's the list. Prices are good through December 31st.

Happy Reading!

Sociable Robots

Have you ever wished you could have your own C3PO-like robot companion?  Robot engineer Cynthia Breazeal is working on it! Learn more about the current state of sociable robots from robot engineer Cynthia Breazeal (Designing Sociable Robots), in this NOVA ScienceNOW profile.

World AIDS Day

AIDS was once an issue that few people were willing to acknowledge or talk about.  Thanks to early outspoken activists, discussions about AIDS and eventually HIV have led to greater awareness, research and government funding to help fight this epidemic.  December 1st is World AIDS Day, and people around the world are gathering to openly support awareness and education about AIDS/HIV.

To learn more about the early days of AIDS and the dangers of a silent epidemic, you might want to look at David Wojnarowicz, a collection of interviews with an artist diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980's.  We also recommend books such as Melancholia and Moralism and The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003.